Robot behaviors

In robotics, behaviors are a mapping between sensory data and actions. This behaviors:

  • Achieve or maintain a goal
  • Are time extended
  • Can take input from sensors or from other behaviors
  • Are more complex than single actions
  • Are executed in parallel

Another key property of the systems is that there are complex behaviors that can appear from the combination of simple ones, sometimes unexpectedly, which are called emergent behaviors. 20210713103850

On of the key points when using behaviors is how to decide, among all the behaviors, if many of them are activated how to combine or select between them.

The research and adaptation of animal behaviors 20211229192654 in the robotic field made the reactive paradigm emerge on 1980 20210711201545 and also, after that, help on the research of hybrid architectures 20210711201605.

Behaviors can be defined using schema theory 20211229200605 and can be easily mapped into code using Object Oriented Programming 20220126192156.

Designing a behavior based system

The steps for designing a behavioral system, taken from Behavior-Based Robotics (Arkin 1998), are:

  1. Describe the task
  2. Describe the robot
  3. Describe the environment
  4. Describe how the robot should act in response to its environment
  5. Implement and refine each behavior
  6. Test each behavior independently
  7. Test behaviors together

The first steps introduce the constraints for the implementation, and the last three are less abstract steps. What is often considered more an art is the point number 4, which is to describe how the robot should act.

Notes References

20211229192654 Takeaways from animal behaviors applied to robotics

20211229200605 Schema theory and behaviors

20210713103850 Robotics - Emergent behaviors

20220126192156 Implementing behaviors using schema theory and OOP

20210711201545 Robotics Basics - Reactive Paradigm

20210711201605 Robotics Basics - Hybrid Paradigm

20210514183815 INDEX - Robotics

References

(Murphy 2000) (Matariâc 2007)

Arkin, Ronald C. 1998. Behavior-Based Robotics. Intelligent Robots and Autonomous Agents. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Matariâc, Maja J. 2007. The Robotics Primer. Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents Series. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Murphy, Robin. 2000. Introduction to AI Robotics. Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.